What Google and Stanford PhDs really think about wind and solar

Google hired Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein (aerospace engineering) and David Fork (applied physics). They are real engineers who understand difficult physics. The two were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.

RE<C was a failure, and Google closed it down after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum.

They write in their published report:

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …

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4 thoughts on “The Leap Manifesto Facts Centre”

I smell black and white thinking here. Either renewable energy will solve all our problems or it cannot help us. To fight the coming crises of climate change, resource exhaustion, and population growth we need to do everything: conserve energy, consume less things, change lifestyles to permit lower resource use, travel less, eat less meat, increase organic sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, energy storage, smart grids, nuclear power, more community oriented everything, universal education of girls and women, universal health care, access to contraception, social safety net for the disabled and elderly, prosperity without growth – to name a few. We can make a better lifestyle at the same time as we solve our energy, resource, and climate problems. Or we can argue over what to do first until we are all gone.

Should we go with reason (which is science) or just whatever Naomi says is good for the environment? Its a fact that wind and solar are bad for the environment when everything is added up. Population growth is over by the way. Organic agriculture costs more (you can tell cause it costs more to buy it) which means it uses _more_ resources than normal agriculture. Energy storage is great, as long as you have a dam, batteries will not cut it. Ask any African about prosperity without growth and they will tell you what they want.

There is no way that people with anything but degrees in engineering, chemistry and physics should be making decisions on energy, just as engineers should not be used to make decisions on social welfare. The problem with Naomi Klein and similar people is that they have wishful thinking engineering going on in their heads, and wishes don’t bring real progress.

Yes, wind and solar are bad for the environment, but not as bad as fossil energy. Energy conservation is the most important thing. Americans use 80 times as much energy as their little bodies need. This seems obscene to me. Using our technology, we can reduce our resource consumption to the level of Africans, and still maintain a very good lifestyle. When we develop and export that technology, Africans can join the affluent life without using more resources.

As an engineer, I am painfully aware that engineers and scientists do not play a significant part in decision making. I have been told flat-out by an executive, “engineers have no business being concerned about ethics.” If we are going to hold onto the idea of democracy, everyone should be involved in policy decisions. To do this, everyone has to be literate enough about science to know when they are being lied to.

There is no way that anyone on earth can “maintain a very good lifestyle” on 50 watts of power per person (for transport, cooling, heating). Its simply not possible. Energy usage is not tied to the environment for humans (unless we regress down the solar/wind/biomass way). Energy for humans can come in the form of truly unlimited nuclear power, at a reasonable price, so that we don’t have to strip mine our natural surroundings for biomass, wind or solar. IPCC scientists and the Green Industrial Complex are now the $1.5 trillion/year problem, not the solution.